EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

I’m a fan of Timpsons, the shoe-mending folks who sort you out with watch batteries and keys and all those other things you could easily plan for in advance but because you haven’t, become a sudden and urgent need. They’re a brilliant employer of ex-offenders, did you know?

Currently, there are approximately 10 million people in the UK with a criminal conviction. At Timpson we believe it is madness to throw such a large section of society on the employment scrapheap. By carefully selecting the right individuals to work in our business, we have enabled thousands of ex-offenders to have a second chance in life and go on to have rewarding careers. Often, other employers don’t realise they can be missing out on some very talented, hardworking individuals. Their loss is our gain. Currently, our retention rate for colleagues who we have recruited from prison or who have a criminal conviction is approximately 75%. This means that the vast majority of colleagues that we employ from prison do not re-offend.

They are a principled, effective and successful outfit as far as I am able to tell. Forgive me, but the same cannot be said for our current government or their political opponents.

We’ve been reading the Timpson Report on Exclusions this week. I don’t think former Education Minister Edward Timpson is a scion of the cobbler Timpsons, but he grew up in a family which fostered almost 90 children. He was handed a difficult job which he fulfilled diligently. He made 100 visits and took 1000 submissions, completing the report at the turn of the year only for it to be sat on by the department for months while they wrangled about money and power (I’m told).​There are 30 recommendations, which said department has agreed ‘in principle’. I’ll spare you the detail but here are the key points:

A small number of schools are off-rolling (where children are made to leave a school without the proper process being followed) for their own interests.

Councils must be advocates for vulnerable children to make sure they are well-placed

Funding is a problem but good practice is still possible

Most schools take a balanced and measured approach to using exclusion but some don’t

Boys are substantially more likely to be excluded in primary school than girls.

Persistent disruptive behaviour accounts for around a third of all exclusions

Alternative Provision provides education to excluded pupils but it is often not very good

Schools face a particular challenge in recognising, understanding and meeting the needs of children in, or on the edge of, the care system.

Ofsted should ‘consistently recognise’ inclusive schools

All of this is pretty obvious so I shall make obvious points in my turn. The biggest problems in our system are these:

It values autonomy above all things, which means that there are over 20000 individual decision-makers making decisions behind closed doors.

It values simple outcomes such as GCSE results because they are cheap to measure. This has driven the system mad. Troubled, vulnerable and needy children do not get good exam results so schools who are in trouble or who wish to seek pre-eminence by exam results are reluctant to admit them or keep them.

There are too few teachers in the system and all of them are working harder. This means that behaviour support is stretched.

Schools have no money. They have to prioritise teaching so all the pastoral support has withered away.

Political decisions have stripped the public sector to the bone. As well as too few police there are too few youth workers, psychologists, social workers. There is no one to turn to.

As the man said, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. We’ve spent billions of pounds on structural and management alterations in public services and Brexit. If we cared about children we’d have spent the money on them. Vulnerable children don’t care whether their school is community or academy and they certainly don’t care whether they might get blue or red passports. They can’t see the long-term, they’re very likely to end up in prison and they make terrible decisions because they’re trying desperately to protect themselves from further harm.

Austerity has taken a terrible toll on its children.

Timpson described a system where the best hope for an excluded child might be Timpson’s. How do we live with that?

Ahoy there from the good ship Tallis. The crew are aboard and ready to sail tomorrow: I thought you’d be interested to know which flags we’re hoisting for the 2018-19 voyage?

I can’t actually go any further with this image. I like a nautical vision, but lack the knowledge to back it up. I know there’s a flag combination that says ‘stop carrying out your intentions and follow my instructions immediately’ which is just the kind of thing that Headteachers like. I might have it made into a hat.

How were the results? Sixth form first. We’re pleased with them, and have got a bumper crop into university, art college and onto apprenticeships. Seven into Oxford and Cambridge and 2 into Central St Martins, lots of others on really competitive courses, into sought-after universities and where they wanted to go. We enrolled nearly 280-ish into year 12, which is jolly nice.

GCSE is hard to tell until we get our nationally-determined progress score in September. We hope to improve on last year’s. Some areas did super-well, some improved, some still need to improve, some were hit by misfortune. We have a plan for all of it. Jane Austen wisely warns that Pride and Prejudice doesn’t give a description of the geography of Derbyshire and similarly this blog doesn’t go into detail about results. Look on our website for more.

We have 18 new teachers (our total teaching force is about 120) and 22 new support staff and we all know each other now. Some works needed doing over the holidays which were done and some which weren’t done. We hit a PFI-related contractual problem with getting some ICT upgrades to classrooms and we’re sorry about that. I’ll keep you informed. There’s lots of shiny new paint about, some of it on me.

Yesterday we met as a staff and looked at the things we stand for, what we believe and how we try to do them. Our Leadership Group is one smaller so we explained how the roles are shared out. We remembered that we want our young people to use our habits and be inquisitive, collaborative, persistent, disciplined and imaginative. We committed ourselves again to our characteristics of being kind, fair, honest, respectful and optimistic. I talked about the work I’ve been doing on ethical leadership and the public service values of selflessness, honesty, openness, objectivity, integrity, accountability and leadership. I committed us to the ethical leadership virtues of trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism. And we remembered how to use the data-collection system and met some of the PTFA. Curriculum teams spent time together planning and sorting.

Today we’ve done nuts-and-bolts stuff on classroom practice and expectations and systems, met as year teams, renewed our safeguarding training and looked again at GPDR. We are martyrs to excitement. New staff have tried to work out our frankly peculiar room numbering system and who everyone is. Planner, postcards, posters and lots of other things beginning with other letters have been gathered and squirreled away. Timetables have been printed and reprinted and all the lunchtime staff had first aid training.

Outside, education storms still buffet us all. We don’t have enough money. I did a phone interview for the Jeremy Vine show about mobile phones. Again. There’s a panic in the press about high rates of exclusion and schools’ internal exclusion methods. There’s panic about off-rolling year 11s, high rates of self-harm and London knife crime. Couldn’t we link those things? Schools without money can’t afford support services to help young people cope with themselves. That’s harder for them because all anyone talks about is results, as if that’s all childhood is for. Shrinking police numbers and disappearing youth and outreach services leave struggling young people to chance and the market forces of the streets. As a nation we don’t care enough about them to spend enough money on them. But we care enough about Brexit, it seems, to spend our all on it.

And meanwhile the biggest injustice goes unaddressed. What do 22% of shadow cabinet ministers, 33% of MPs and Russell Group university Vice-Chancellors, 43% of newspaper columnists, 44% of the Rich List, 50% of the cabinet and the House of Lords, 55% of Whitehall Permanent Secretaries, 67% of Oscar winners, 71% of senior officers in the armed forces and 74% of senior judges have in common? All privately educated. The 7% keeping its stranglehold on the 93%. How do we fix this?

Storm cones hoisted. Time to understand the world, and change it for the better.